PlutoX: Make Drone Tennis a Thing

Ever since PlutoX came to life, our in-house tinkerers Shivani Salian and Tanmay Karpe have been kept busy with it. They’ve been working together on several unique modules for PlutoX but with this one, they’ve hit the sweet spot! Meet the TenniX! Didn’t get it? Well to put it shortly, they’ve come up with an obstacle avoidance module that lets you play Table Tennis with PlutoX. Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? Well here’s a glimpse of it!

Learning becomes easier when we add a little bit of fun to it. Here using the idea of obstacle detection, rather than just implementing simple obstacle avoidance in the drone’s path, I thought of playing a game with it.

To understand the basic ideas of IR sensors and detection, I thought of building a game based on this using a drone. In this game of table tennis, we can replace the ball with a drone. There will be 2 IR sensors on either side which will detect a TT racket in its range and will move in the opposite direction thus 2 players can easily play this game.

For this we require the RC roll to be OFF and for it to roll in the opposite direction by itself as given in the code. I have used PlutoX controller which has its own open source Cygnus IDE on which I implemented my code.

Want to try it out yourself?

Components Required

PlutoXFINALIZING

PrimusX board

2 IR sensors(V53LOX)

Breakout board

600 mAh battery.

Getting the hardware ready

The IR sensor that I have integrated consists of 5 connections namely VCC, GND, RESET, I2C pins SCL and SDA

Vcc is connected to BAT pin

The breakout board provides I2c connections

Pin 6 to SDA

Pin 7 to SCL

Pins 13 & 15 are the default pins for getting range from IR sensors using Xshield API which is connected to pin X on sensor module.

Getting the Software Ready

Breakout board gives the range from IR sensors

If an obstacles is encountered within 150mm, the drone moves in the opposite direction

Using IR sensors on both sides a drone can be used to play Table tennis